Making fun of social justice, campus band and choir edition

Much of the band’s mockery was directed at the university’ssexual respect education program, a new requirement for all undergraduate and graduate students, which gives participants the option of attending a workshop on subjects like “bystander intervention,” orsubmitting artworkabout sexual respect.

“The arts option was inspired by the random doodles scrawled by judiciary hearing panels when they pretend to listen to survivors’ stories,” Orli Matlow, one of the band’s two readers, joked to laughter from those gathered in the library.

An alleged rapist, she continued, had “submitted the following haiku:

“I am so sorry

Rape is very very bad

Let me graduate.”

The band also made light of a recent protest by a Columbia anti-sexual assault group, No Red Tape, during which the words “Columbia Protects Rapists” wasprojectedonto the university’s Low Library when prospective students were visiting the school.

“An army of high school creepers is now thinking, ‘Yes, I will go to Columbia after all,’” the band’s “poet laureate,” Mikhail Klimentov, a junior, said.